Tool I built for tracking federal legislation changes relevant to specific business categories
Background: I kept running into small business owners who found out about regulatory changes after the fact -- from their accountant, after the law was already signed. Compliance teams at larger companies have legal subscriptions for this, but there's nothing low-cost built for small operators.
So I built BillWatch. The operator picks policy categories that affect their business (minimum wage, healthcare mandates, SBA programs, tax policy, import tariffs, food safety, labor law, financial regulations, etc.) and it monitors every federal bill in Congress. When a relevant bill gets introduced, clears committee, or moves to a floor vote, they get a plain-English summary -- not a link to 80 pages of legislative text.
The technical piece: nightly pull from Congress.gov API, run through a topic classifier rather than keyword matching. This means it catches bills affecting a sector even when the legislative language uses indirect terminology.
Federal-only for now. State legislation is a later milestone.
Would value feedback from compliance professionals on whether the category taxonomy makes sense, and what information would actually be actionable vs. noise at the point a bill is introduced vs. signed.
https://billwatch-landing.vercel.app
$9/month -- built for the long tail of operators who can't justify Lexis or Bloomberg Law.